ping
I don't know? Indoor plumbing maybe, the spread of Christianity?
Our language, and most of our law.
I suppose the endless fascination with the Romans stems from the fact that we are their descendants in terms of civilization and culture. Despite our manifest differences, many ideas crucial to the Romans are likewise crucial to us -- distributed, non-centralized power in government, the rule of law, peace through strength, and big engineering projects in serivce of the public good. They didn't always live up to their ideals (as neither do we), but the net impact of Roman presence on the world and the sum total of human culture was positive, as is ours.
Dormice. Just the treat for dorcats.
"American viewers in the 1970s certainly took the seedy court politics on display in the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves's I Claudius as an allegory of Nixon's White House - a parallel which may possibly have been in the mind of the film-makers"......and was definitely in the mind of the writer of this article. No one else drew such a ridiculous parallel.
I watched the series with fascination. There was essentially no parallel to the Nixon admiistration. There were more parallels to the Kennedy administration.
I also bought and read Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during the Jimmy Carter presidency. I realized that any nation that would elect a moron like that, and let him serve out four years and make foreign and domestic policy, was likely headed for a fall, and I wanted to know how such a collapse would come about.
It is obvious that the Left today represents Decadence--the same kind of Decay that brought about the fall of Rome and all its horrors.
The Clinton administration and the complicity and interference run by the press to all its corruption, the mendacity of the press and our universities and their service to propaganda, the corruption in the press and the Democrat Party--all are unmistakable signs of Decadence (as though the free fall of American cultural standards were not evidence enough).
It is the American Heartland that is vibrant, energetic, optimistic, and ascendant. It has everything to offer.
The Left has nothing to offer but mendacity, asassination of the characters of its opponents, and a ruthless grasp for power--just like Livia, Tiberias, Poppea, Nero, Caligula--the list goes on and on.
The Left is Decadence.
The Marxists said religion was the opiate of the people, but I've often thought there was much to the phrase, "Bread and circuses" to keep the populace quiet.
Toga parties!
What did the Romans do for us?
Not sure of everything they did, but I see a lot of cool movies with glad he ate her's and stuff, and I refuse to buy a watch or clock without them new-fangled roman numerals on them.
The Decadence of the West parallels the Decadence of Rome. The Left is its contemporary manifestation. Leftist propaganda organs such as The Guardian feed it.
The closest she can come to comprehending what's occurring is the irrelevant and unlikely Nixon Administration, hardly an example of Decadence at all.
She--and those who produce The Guardian--are obviously oblivious to the implications of the Carter, Clinton, and Kennedy Administrations, the absurdity of the election of the likes of Jacques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder, and the nomination of a man such as John Kerry to the U.S. Presidency; the paralysis of Europe in preventing a Muslim conquest; ubiquitous abuse of addictive drugs in the West; the decline of Christianity and the rise of crypto-atheisim; the persistence of Marxism though it has failed consistently and killed more than 100 million people; the suicidal loss of the will to survive in many nations of Western Europe; the glorification of sexual promiscuity even as the HIV plague mushrooms; the decline of the family; the replacement of the old morality with the new morality, i.e. permissiveness; the sacrifice of the values of Western Civilization before silly phantom of Diversity; the abandonment of truth and its quest, notably in academia and journalism, in favor of propaganda and political expediency... The list goes on and on.
All of this must have escaped Mary--and has certainly escaped the producers of The Guardian, judging from their past publications.
They evidently have no comprehension whatsoever of Decadence and how it has infected contemporary Western Civilization and how it brought about the slow and horrifying fall of Rome, its ultimate collapse, and the thousand-years darkness that folowed.
They also evidently have no understanding that the fall of the West--as much as they may dispise it--would be followed by the rise of something far worse, even than their jaded vision of Western Civilization, ignominious as it undoubtedly must be.
Nobody has mentioned the Roman Military and the concept of the Fighting Engineers.
Our military practically rebuilds a country as we go, much the same as the Romans did.
Although Ike admired the German Autobahns, the idea of military roads was entirely Roman. So Ike built our Interstate highway system. Look on th U.S. map and you can see that every I-state connects military bases.
"Rome now equals America, as once it equalled Britain"
Only in somebodies teenage fantasy did Britain ever equal Rome.
One thing for sure: the Romans provided jobs for people like the author of this article. Without Romans, he'd have done something else for living.
"It's sometimes hard for us to believe that the ancient Romans really existed in the quotidian sense. But they were real, visceral, passionate people.
"Certain things are repressed in our own culture, like the open enjoyment of others' pain, the desire to make people submit to your will, the guilt-free use of slaves. This was all quite normal to the Romans."
Carolyn
Actually, the I Claudius series was replicated during the Clinton years...including his tenure as gov. of Arkansas.
I love the HBO series - what is does best, is portray a completely pre-Christian world, with a completely pre-Christian mindset. It is a scary and mysterious place, and it makes me really glad to have been born in 20th century America.
Reg: Yeah, all right Stan, don't delay with the point. And what have they ever given us in return?
Revolutionary I: The aqueduct?
Reg: What?
Revolutionary I: The aqueduct.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah, they did give us that, ah, that's true, yeah.
Revolutionary II: And the sanitation.
Loretta: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like.
Reg: Yeah, all right, I'll grant you the aqueduct and sanitation, the two things the Romans have done.
Matthias: And the roads.
Reg: Oh, yeah, obviously the roads. I mean the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads...
Revolutionary III: Irrigation.
Revolutionary I: Medicine.
Revolutionary IV: Education.
Reg: Yeah, yeah, all right, fair enough.
Revolutionary V: And the wine.
All revolutionaries except Reg: Oh, yeah! Right!
Rogers: Yeah! Yeah, that's something we'd really miss Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
Revolutionary VI: Public bathes.
Loretta: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
Rogers: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it; they're the only ones who could in a place like this.
All revolutionaries except Reg: Hahaha...all right...
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Revolutionary I: Brought peace?
Reg: Oh, peace! Shut up!
Cement.